If "stolen a march" means it has done a better job of establishing Cloud Foundry than VMware could have done, then that's a good thing. But I would say that the data-management team has not been ahead of competing Hadoop distributions. Hortonworks and Cloudera introduced their distributions around Apache Hadoop 2.2 late last year and early this year, respectively. There's also the issue of HAWQ and GemFire XD not being managed by YARN as yet. Still to come also are elements of object storage from GemFire that aren't yet a part of the (mostly SQL Fire-based) GemFire XD.

If the data-management competition is viewed to be IBM, Oracle, and Teradata, then, yes, you could say Pivotal is executing quickly. I haven't heard a thing about IBM's BigSQL. Oracle is defering all things Hadoop to Cloudera and Teradata is doing pretty much the same with Hortonworks.

Feels like the Big Data use cases for In-Memory Data Grid may be taken care of by combinations of open source solutions like Spark and others. Lots of In-Memory Computing vendors trying to embrace Hadoop, but it feels like the real usage of IMDG is in transactional data processing as well as more real-time analytic processing. At least that's how it is for Hazelcast.

It's tempting for vendors to try to embrance Hadoop and Big Data especially seeing how slow disk-based Hadoop is but over time it seems like the Grid vendors like Gemfire should stay in the transaction and transactional analytics regions where they are strongest.

I agree with what you say in your comment, Doug, but I'd have to add that, if nothing else, Pivotal has stolen a march for VMware by establishing Cloud Froundry so convincingly as a PaaS supplier. Now its showing the value of its GemFire and GreenPlum acquistions working with Hadoop. Cloudera and Hortonworks have the Hadoop brain trusts. Pivotal is executing pretty fast for the strange mix of elements in its toolbox.

The software-development, cloud-platform, and data-management aspects of the Pivotal One platform all have followers and legacy customer bases, but is the combination of all three really compelling and natural? Proponents would say it provides handoffs and integrations that break down barriers that companies would otherwise have to bridge on their own. Critics see Pivotal as a rag-tag collection of technologies that EMC wanted off its balance sheet. In my view, Pivotal is not addressing one, clear arena, so it will be much harder for this company to take off the way VMware did.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.